Scorpion Winter

by Andrew Kaplan

  “Why we going—” Dennis began.

  Scorpion clamped his hand over Dennis’s mouth.

  “Zatknis!” he hissed into Dennis’s ear. Shut up.

  He looked up the ladder at the metal landings above but saw nothing, then tested his weight on the fire escape. Everything was radioactive and had been rotting for a long time but it seemed solid. He put his finger to his lips, then climbed step by step up the fire escape to the second floor. Dennis followed. Their footsteps grated hollowly on the metal stairs. Too loud, Scorpion thought. If he Shelayev was there, he’d know they were coming. They needed to get off the fire escape. A broken window on the landing was open, and Scorpion stepped through it into an empty apartment and onto a snowdrift. Dennis came in behind him. Scorpion motioned for him to follow.

  They tiptoed through the apartment trying to avoid crunching on broken glass and went out to the hallway. Even there they could feel the icy wind. Adjusting his night vision goggles, Scorpion started carefully up the hallway stairs. When he reached the top floor, he paused and peered down the hallway, with its glints of broken glass from a faint glow of light coming from the corner apartment. It appeared empty. No cameras, no surveillance, no wires. He stepped into the hallway but stayed close to the wall, not walking down the middle of the corridor. He sensed Dennis behind him, breathing heavily.

  Scorpion stopped at the half-open door of the apartment next to the corner apartment. Shelayev was Spetsnaz, he told himself again. He couldn’t go straight in. He turned to Dennis, put his finger to his lips and motioned for him to stay there. Dennis nodded that he understood. Scorpion pressed his ear against the wall but could hear nothing. If someone was in the corner apartment, he wasn’t moving around. He stepped through the half-open door into the next-door apartment, the Glock ready, walked into an empty room and checked the door to the balcony. It had no glass. Stepping out on the balcony, he peered around the edge of the wall at the corner apartment balcony. It was close enough to jump over, and he could use the balcony wall to help balance himself.

  He just started to put his foot on the balcony ledge when he heard a sound behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw Dennis starting to walk toward the corner apartment. He must’ve gotten bored waiting or he had seen or heard something, Scorpion thought.

  “Dennis, don’t!” he shouted, thinking, You stupid son of a bitch as he climbed back into the room. He ran back through the room toward the hallway, catching a glimpse of Dennis as he passed the open doorway.

  The explosion flung Scorpion off his feet, hurling pieces of the wall at him.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Krasnoe

  Chernobylska Exclusion Zone

  The forest was silent except for the sound of the wind. Scorpion shook his head. His ears still rang from the explosion. He had left the Volkswagen on what passed for a road and had come through the woods on foot, stopping at every step to check for trip wires and other booby traps. It was his fault Dennis was dead, he thought. He should’ve kept him out of it. But he couldn’t just leave him, not knowing what Dennis might have done or who he might’ve talked to.

  He had found Dennis’s body blown a dozen feet from where the explosion went off. Using his flashlight, he found the trip wire Dennis had set off when he walked into the apartment. From the size of the explosion, it had been hooked to just an ounce or two of C-4, Scorpion calculated. Strictly antipersonnel. The light they saw from the roof of the tall apartment house was lying on the floor. It was an LED that had been on a battered old table until the explosion knocked it over, still connected with a copper wire to a double-A battery. A simple lure, like those used to catch fish at night, and right out of the Spetsnaz manual, he thought.

  Except for the light and the booby trap, there was no sign of Shelayev. Scorpion looked around the apartment, checking for more booby traps or surveillance. Shelayev had left the booby trap for whoever came after him. Sending a message: don’t come any further.

  He went back to Dennis’s body and fished around in the pants pockets until he came up with the keys to the Lada. He took back the five thousand hryvnia he had given him. Whoever found Dennis would just take it. Damn you, he silently cursed the dead body. Why didn’t you just stand there like I told you?

  One thing was clear. Iryna had been right. Shelayev was somewhere in the Exclusion Zone, or he wouldn’t be trying to chase pursuers away. When he did find Shelayev, he thought grimly, he would be ringed with defenses out of the Spetsnaz playbook.

  Scorpion stepped out onto the balcony. Shelayev wasn’t in Pripyat. But he had known that when someone came looking, sooner or later, they’d have to check the city, so he set a trap. Scorpion looked out over the city hidden in the darkness. There were no lights anywhere and only one or two stars in the sky, the rest hidden by cloud cover. He saw no movement except for the wind. If anyone heard the explosion, there was no sign of it. He went back to the body, picked up Dennis’s Geiger counter. Heaving his pack over one shoulder, he went back down the stairs and out the back of the building.

  Walking down the middle of an empty avenue toward the Palace of Culture, Scorpion heard a sound behind him and whirled into shooting position. At first he saw nothing, and then spotted an odd-looking long-eared owl perched on top of a child’s swing near an apartment building. He let the gun hang down at his side and went on. Being alone in this city at night was like a postapocalyptic movie; Mad Max without even the crazies, he thought. When he reached the Palace of Culture parking lot, he got into the Lada and drove through the city, the shadowy silhouette of the reactor building and the smokestacks and cranes looming above the trees.

  He drove back to Chernobyl, his headlights carving a tunnel of light in the darkness. There were only bare trees and the snowy road. He turned on his cell phone to try to get the news, but this deep into the Exclusion Zone, there was no reception. The phone was useless, which meant there was no WiFi either. No way to know what was happening with the crisis.

  When he got to Chernobyl, he’d have to bribe the militsiyu at the checkpoint, he thought. But driving up to the checkpoint, he saw it was closed. Evidently no one ever came this way at night. Why should they? It was a dead world.

  He parked the Lada not far from the Tourist Office and left the keys in the ignition, taking Dennis’s map of the Exclusion Zone from the glove compartment. Since he’d been wearing gloves all along, he didn’t need to wipe the Lada down for prints. He went back to the Volkswagen, got in, and turned on the car’s inside light to check Dennis’s map. Krasnoe was almost exactly due north of the nuclear reactor.

  He drove back toward the reactor site. It took a while in the dark, but he found the unmarked road to Krasnoe. Meanwhile, having turned on Dennis’s Geiger counter beeper, he listened to it beep. The radiation level was serious, and he knew if he wasn’t careful, there was a good chance he’d come out of this with cancer.

  The road north from the reactor site led through a wooded area, spindly limbs covered with snow. A single pair of tire ruts and the four-wheel drive kept him moving through the snow. It took a half hour to cover half a dozen kilometers. When he saw a house with no lights covered with vegetation like a house in a fairy tale and trees growing through the roof, he knew it had to be Krasnoe. Stopping in the middle of the road, he got out and checked the Geiger counter. It read: 1.824. It would have to do, he thought, grabbing his gear and the Glock.

  He walked into the deserted village. There was an onion-domed wooden church next to what might have once been a village square, now taken over by the woods. The houses were like wooden islands in the forest, every one of them abandoned, covered with moss and trees. He tried to stay in the clear, not touching the trees if possible, turning off the Geiger counter’s clicking sound. Icicles and dead branches hung down from the trees like stalactites. There were no sounds, not even birds.

  He walked through the town looking for a hut with a light on the outskirts that might belong to Pani Mazhalska, tramping for what seemed hours
through the foliage, though it was only minutes by his watch. Seeing a light glimmering through the trees, he stopped.

  When Scorpion got closer he saw that the light was coming from a low hut, almost a shed, hidden in the trees. The window was shuttered, the light leaking from an opening where the shutters didn’t fit together. He peered through the opening into the hut, saw a candle on a table and a pot cooking on a burning log in the fireplace. He didn’t see anyone. The door to the hut was so low he had to stoop to knock.

  “Pani Mazhalska, dobry vecher,” he called out in Russian. Good evening. There was no answer. He knocked again, harder. “Pani Mazhalska?”

  Still no answer. He opened the door and went in, ducking his head to clear the top of the door. The walls were covered with animal skins, vegetation, and a shelf full of bottles with dark colored liquids. There was a wooden bench near the fire. Scorpion checked it with the Geiger counter: 1.271. He sat and waited. About ten minutes later the door opened and a tiny old woman with a round peasant face came in. She was carrying a bundle of wood and a dead squirrel. When she saw Scorpion, she screamed and dropped the wood and the squirrel. She reached into her sack and pulled out a straw doll that she held before her.

  “Ne byyete mene!” she cried out. Don’t hurt me!

  “Ya droohoo.” I’m a friend. “I won’t hurt you,” Scorpion said.

  “Ne trogaite moyu belku,” don’t touch—he couldn’t catch the rest—she said, putting the dead squirrel on the table. Scorpion guessed belku meant squirrel.

  He took the bottle of Nemiroff out of his pack and asked if she wanted some.

  “Khto vy? Shcho vy khochete?” she asked, going to a cupboard. Who are you? What do you want? She took out a mismatched pair of jars that served as glasses and put them on the table. Scorpion poured them both good shots.

  “Ya droohoo. Budmo,” he toasted, and drank. She watched him, her eyes narrow, then sat down and drained her jar.

  ‘What do you want?” she asked again, in Russian.

  “Informatsiya,” he said. “I can pay,” and he put a few hundred hryvnia on the table.

  “The tours come in the day. Tourists come. Always the same questions. Why do you live here? Aren’t you afraid of the radioactivity? Stupid.” She shrugged, holding up her jar for a refill.

  “You’re not afraid?” Scorpion asked, pouring her another drink.

  “Pah,” she sneered, and tossed back the horilka. “The same tourist people who ask me, you think they’ll live forever? What difference?” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “When God wants to crush us, we’re done,” she said, crossing herself. “An old Jew once told me—you know before the war, there were many Jews in Chernobyl—he told me a saying: ‘Men make a plan—and God laughs.’ I like this saying. I like it very much,” she said, taking the money and sticking it in her pocket. “What do you want to know, miy drooh?”

  “I’m looking for a man. Big man, long blond hair.” Scorpion gestured hair falling over his eyes. “His name is Dimitri Shelayev. He is maybe using a different name. He came here in the past four or five days. Have you seen him?”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “I see nichoho.” Nothing. “No one,” she added, and looked away. She stood and got a knife, spit on it, then came over to the table and started skinning the squirrel in front of him. “What makes you think I know?”

  “Dennis. The tour guide,” Scorpion said. “He says you know everything, everyone in the zona.”

  “I know nothing, nichoho,” not looking at him.

  “I know he’s in the zona. Gde on?” Scorpion asked. Where is he?

  She didn’t answer. When she finished skinning the squirrel, she wiped her hands on her dress and speared the squirrel on an iron spit, head and all. She went over to the fire and lifted the lid on the pot. The smell of kasha groats filled the hut.

  “You’ve seen him, this Dimitri, haven’t you?” Scorpion said. “What did he tell you? That people were coming to kill him?”

  She stopped what she was doing and took a crude wooden crucifix on a string, the kind that might be found in any flea market in Ukraine, from around her neck. She slapped it into his palm and closed his hand around it.

  “You are a ubiitsa,” killer. “I see it in your eyes,” she said. “Why?”

  “Not by choice.”

  “I see that too,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “What do you want with this man?”

  “I want him to tell the truth.”

  “Only that?”

  Scorpion nodded.

  “Worse and worse. Sometimes the truth is more dangerous than an army,” she said, putting the spit over the fire to roast the squirrel. She turned the spit. The hut filled with smoke and the smell of roasting meat.

  “True,” he said.

  “This man,” she said. “He is not called Dimitri. He says his name is Yevhen. Most of the samosely—the squatters—who live in the zona of Exclusion are old, like me. We come to live our last days in a place we know. Here there is no rent, no taxes. Only death. But this Yevhen is new. He lives in a cabin near Zimovishche. It’s three kilometers from here, east of Pripyat.”

  “Spasiba,” thanks, Scorpion said, getting up. He handed the crucifix back to her. He started to close his jacket and put the bottle of Nemiroff back into his pack.

  “You want to stay and eat?” she asked. “Kasha and belku. It’s good.”

  “Nyet, spasiba,” he said, getting ready. As he stooped to go out the door, she called after him.

  “This Yevhen. He has eyes like yours. Maybe you kill him,” she said. “Maybe he kill you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Zimovishche

  Chernobylska Exclusion Zone

  The farmhouse was in the woods at the edge of an abandoned village. Scorpion had taken a road that led from the river into what must have once been farmland and was now an empty landscape covered with snow. The tree line was beyond the fields. Shelayev had chosen well, he thought. The woods could not be approached from the road except across the open snow. It would give Shelayev plenty of warning if anyone tried to approach.

  He stopped the car in the middle of the road, got out and studied the open field from behind the car through his night vision goggles. He could see light coming from somewhere in the trees, the only sign of life in the night. The snow in the field had footprints going from the road to the woods, but was otherwise empty. Crossing the field was not only a giveaway, it was possible the field was mined or booby-trapped. Shelayev had already shown he knew how to make a bomb and set a trap.

  Scorpion looked to the right, at the abandoned houses of the village. He could approach the woods from that side, he decided. The houses would give him some cover and possibly had lower radiation levels.

  There was an irrigation ditch beside the road, with a glimmer of ice at the bottom. He slid into the ditch and made his way toward the edge of the village. While in the ditch, he was hidden from anyone looking out from the woods. He nearly stumbled over something in the bottom of the ditch. It smelled appalling. As he climbed around it, he saw it was the remains of a wild horse.

  When he got near the village, he peeked out over the top of the ditch. An abandoned house, shrubs and bare trees growing on its roof, shielded him from the woods. He scrambled out of the ditch, went around the back of the house and into the woods.

  He stepped slowly, using his night vision goggles to scan for trip wires before he took each step. Then he heard something and froze. The cry of a night bird and a sudden flutter of wings. Damn, he thought. If Shelayev was waiting, that would have sounded the alarm. He froze behind a tree, took a deep breath and peered around the trunk. With his night goggles, he could see the house about two hundred meters ahead. It was overgrown with vegetation and snow on the roof, like all the other houses in the zone. As he stepped out from behind the tree, a bullet tore a chip of wood from the trunk a few inches from his head. He dove to the ground behind a fallen log.

  He hadn
’t heard the shot, just a faint chunking sound, so Shelayev had used a sound suppressor. If he was Spetsnaz-trained and using a rifle at two hundred meters, Scorpion reflected, he shouldn’t have missed. Odds were, Shelayev was using a pistol. The question was, what to do about it? He couldn’t stay behind the log. He looked around. There was a tree with a thick trunk about ten meters away. He found a pinecone and tossed it at a bush in the opposite direction, then made a dash to the tree as a bullet ricocheted off a tree behind him.

  “Dmitri Shelayev, ne strelyaite!” Scorpion called out in Russian. Don’t shoot! “Alyona’s safe. I just want to talk.”

  Two bullets thunked one after the other into the tree trunk he was standing behind.

  He’s good, Scorpion thought as he scrambled on all fours, dodging through the trees on a diagonal toward the cabin. He still couldn’t tell where Shelayev was firing from, except that it was from somewhere near the house. Through his goggles, he spotted movement from near the house into the shadows of the trees. He crouched beside a bare tree that had grown at a strange angle, realizing he needed a diversion.

  Scorpion placed the Geiger counter in the crook of a branch on the angled tree and got ready to move. He turned on the beeper and fired the Glock toward where he’d last seen movement, then ran to a large tree close to the house, the beeper sounding behind him. He could hear shots coming from a stand of trees about forty meters from the angled tree. Holding his breath, he strained to listen. It was very faint, but he heard it. The sound of someone moving through the branches, toward the angled tree. The sounds stopped. Time to move, Scorpion thought.

  He ran toward the house and around to the side, crouching low. He was below a small windowsill, and risked raising his head to peer into the house. The light he had seen was from a candle on a table. The house was furnished. It had the feel of someone living there, but he could see no movement. Ducking back down, he moved slowly on all fours to the corner of the house, where he waited and listened. He could hear the Geiger counter beeping faintly. It still seemed to be coming from where he had left it.